User:FourViolas/sandbox

This template is very much a work in progress. Anyone is welcome to lend a hand, even though it's in my userspace. See discussion at Template talk:Dance.

Request for photos from Martha Graham Dance Company

Attn: Marketing/Publicity

To whom it may concern:

I am a volunteer contributor to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. I've been working on improving Wikipedia's coverage of dance, and I have a favor to ask.

We have an article about Graham technique, which you can see at en.wikpedia.org/wiki/Graham_technique. It's been viewed thousands of times in the last three months. Because dance is a visual medium, it's important for the article to have high-quality illustrations. We would love to use one or more of the photos whose copyright you own to illustrate specific technical points, such as the contraction, or general concepts especially important to Graham technique, like floorwork.

Wikipedia respects copyright, and we won't use any of your pictures unless you give us permission. Because Wikipedia is free to be used by anyone, anywhere, we'd have to ask you to release the photo to us under a free-use license (for example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA); you can find the text for this license at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_CC-BY-SA_3.0). If you licensed one or more of your photos under such a license, you would retain full copyright. You can also include a stipulation that every use must credit the photographer, dancers, and dance. However, we would be allowed to display the photos as illustrations, and anyone would be able to copy and use them.

The license does stipulate that any copy of the photographs, even if modified, must carry the same license. This guarantees that if licensed in this manner, no copy of your photos could be made proprietary by another party. Even so, we realize that freely-licensing your organization's proprietary images is a big request, but we hope that you may still consider it as a contribution to our project, and because it may help our readers to better understand your own work.

If you have any interest in possibly allowing Wikipedia to use any of your photographs, please do not hesitate to email me at [redacted], and I would be happy to answer any further questions you may have about our licensing and policies, and our relatively straight-forward procedure for releasing photos to our use.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

The marketing manager, who contacted me after Licensing Manager forwarded her my email with her approval, responded:

Hi [me],

Thanks for being in touch. I'll see if I can pull together a photo or two illustrating a contraction and perhaps a spiral or a hinge.

Thanks, Brigid

Brigid Pierce Marketing Manager Martha Graham Dance Company

and I responded

"Hi Brigid,

Thank you so much! We really appreciate your help.

Once you've chosen photos, they'll need to be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. This is a little complicated, but I can help you reduce it to two easy steps:

1.) Email me, attaching the photos. (You need an account to upload them, and I can save you the trouble of registering one. Of course, you can create your own account and upload them directly if you want.)

2.) Send permissions-commons@wikimedia.org a release form. Here's the standard one, if you want to copy-paste:

I hereby affirm that I represent [copyright holder's name], the creator and/or sole owner of the exclusive copyright of the attached images, which will be uploaded (permission pending) to the "Dance technique" category on Wikimedia Commons. [I added this part to help the Commons OTRS people find the images in question] (I am releasing permission only for the images, and not the choreography depicted therein.) [the boilerplate language wasn't quite up to the job here.]

I agree to publish the above-mentioned content under the free license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. [This is the standard choice. You may choose another acceptable free license, if you wish to.]

I acknowledge that by doing so I grant anyone the right to use the work in a commercial product or otherwise, and to modify it according to their needs, provided that they abide by the terms of the license and any other applicable laws.

I am aware that this agreement is not limited to Wikipedia or related sites.

I am aware that I always retain copyright of my work, and retain the right to be attributed in accordance with the license chosen. Modifications others make to the work will not be claimed to have been made by me.

I acknowledge that I cannot withdraw this agreement, and that the content may or may not be kept permanently on a Wikimedia project.

[Sender's name] [Sender's authority ("Director", "Appointed representative of", etc.)] [Date]

[Attachments]

Many thanks! Wikipedia relies on this kind of help to get high-quality images. I'm sure this will be great for the Graham article."

So, User:Snow Rise, we can use this as a reference/case study, depending how things go from here, for future requests. We still ought to be working towards the big overhaul eventually.